Thursday, January 14, 2016

A Lonely 80’s Vampire on a Skateboard, or Thoughts on A Girl Walks Home Alone, At Night

Shelia Vand is the vampire skateboard girl

The black and white film opens on a
waif-like girl in an oversized stripey 80’s shirt dancing slowly in her bedroom and
listening to moody synthpop by… Who
is that, Dépêche Mode? Joy
Division? In addition to her
vintage turntable, her room is plastered in posters that look like Madonna and
Michael Jackson at first glance, but like the music, are not quite right. The camera pans over her dresser,
covered in wallets and jewelry. I appreciate
movies that show you everything you need to know about a character in a few
wordless cuts. This is a low
budget indie film avoiding licensing fees with sound-alike music and generic
renderings of famous posters but the filmmaker’s thriftiness is used to create an
off-kilter, surreal dreamscape in A Girl Walks Home Alone, at Night (2014), or
in Arabic: دختریدرشبتنهابهخانهمی‌رود‎‎ Dokhtari dar šab tanhâ be xâne miravad.

Director Ana Lily Amirpour describes
her film as “The First Iranian Vampire Western”, and to my limited knowledge
she is certainly correct.But the Mideast
has a rich and ancient mythology concerning blood-sucking demons, the primary
one being the Babylonian Lilitu, who the Hebrews called Lillith.There’s a really cool Mesopotamian icon that depicts her as a winged woman with bird feet, if you're interested, and how could you not be?

The movie is filmed in Persian, and my
initial thoughts were how were they able to make a movie like this in Iran? It was actually filmed near Bakersfield;
in a bleak landscape that stands in admirably for the deserted Iranian town
known only as Bad City.Oil rigs
pump constantly in the background, the beating heart of the village, the
lifeblood of the country and the only tacit acknowledgement of the current
political state the world finds itself in.

There’s a heavy Jim Jarmusch or David
Lunch vibe to this film, not just because it was filmed in black and white but
with the characters living their lives in quiet indifference amongst surreal
scenes like the unexplained open graves by the side of the road.In the tradition of Eraserhead or Down by Law director Ana Lily Amirpour creates a series of black and white vignettes of various characters connected by a single vampiric thread. The vampire, known in the screen
credits as “The Girl”, is played with a coldly enigmatic resolution by Sheila Vand.She is a dark vision in her black chādor, floating silently across the
empty streets on her stolen skateboard.

The Girl crosses paths with Arash, a young
man driving a classic 50’s Thunderbird who is immediately smitten.You know what will happen next.It’s a quirky vampire love story in the
tradition of Only Lovers Left Alive (Another Jarmusch film), Let the Right One In or one of my favorites, Tony Scott’s The Hunger starring Catherine Deneuve,
David Bowie & Susan Sarandon.(That cast list alone demands that you see this movie).

The Middle East has become so politicized
that it’s refreshing to watch an Arab film that is so apolitical.We can forget that people are people,
all over the world.They fall in
love, have hopes and dreams, disappoint their parents, and go to parties.It’s just important that they remember
to watch out for vampires when they walk home from those parties.

my first novel? thanks for asking:) I wrote a 4 book supernatural martial
arts series concerning the ongoing feud between a group of kung-fu killer
witches in san francsico’s chinatown.